It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art, it must, by its very nature, choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony. Whatever special lens are used, and however the subject is thereby distorted, the camera only knows how to relate things directly. However abstract the composition, therefore, the individual meaning of the objects related inevitably remains as a kind of indispersible precipitate. The photographer’s whole job is to filter this off by one of two methods. The alternatives are the record and the testimony.
- Yukio Mishima - From the Introduction to Eikoh Hosoe’s “Ordeal by Roses” (1971).
Cited in: “Creative Camera International Year Book 1978”, Coo Press, London, 1977, p. 74.